


Things Don't Go As Planned: An OFF Prequel

by Manaya_Karyam



Category: OFF (Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-21
Updated: 2015-11-21
Packaged: 2018-05-02 17:59:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5258258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Manaya_Karyam/pseuds/Manaya_Karyam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Waking up without a single memory, Vader Eloha finds herself in the midst of an international conflict. Bloody work is being done in the name of "purification"! Her big heart can't stand the cruelty. But maybe a creative solution can be found?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things Don't Go As Planned: An OFF Prequel

Vader Eloha jumpstarted, drenched in water, without a single memory.

She gasped like a fish, lungs bloating and shrinking hyperfast. Droplets slid down her face as she looked around wildly. The room was a strange combination of jail cell and baby room: brick walls painted as cloudy sky, barred window and barred crib. A comic book lay in one corner and an injured plush bear in another. A baby lay in the crib.

“Please help,” said the baby - no, toddler - as Vader rose shakily to stand. “Get me out of here.”

A deep feeling swam in Vader’s chest. This was her heart, and this was caring. This was intention. This was the start of a plan.

 

My name is Pablo, and I am a cat. Everyone loves cats, no? Purr. Unfortunately this story contains no other cats. The characters are mainly humans. The baby Hugo is a human, with 4 limbs and 2x5 fingers, and so on. Japhet, whom you will meet, is a human, with two wings and a beak, and so on. Dedan, whom you will meet, is a human with huge chomping teeth… you get the idea. Ordinary; not extraordinary like me.

Now on this particular day I was strolling through the Nation’s capital and experiencing the sun when I met Vader Eloha, darting through an alley, carrying the baby Hugo. I asked the pair if I could be of any assistance.

“Please, Honored Feline,” said Vader respectfully but urgently, “what is a quick and stealthy way out of the city?”

Though normally a law-abiding man, I find myself reluctant to turn in even an obvious criminal to the Nation. Their conduct at the borders - the very quickly expanding borders, as a matter of fact - has quashed any legitimacy I might have afforded them, and I see them as nothing short of tyrannical. I said as much to Vader Eloha while she listened impatiently and cast furtive glances around, and she seemed refreshingly alarmed to hear what most in this city consider commonplace.

“This Nation is conquering other civilizations?” asked the woman, whose mind, despite a lack of memories, was conjuring images of blood and ruins. “Violently, and without consent?”

I told her that the term they use is ‘purifying’.

A deep feeling glinted in Vader’s eyes. This was her mind, and this too was caring. And this too… well, you see where I’m going.

Vader Eloha abandoned secrecy.

In her mind, the stakes had been raised and demanded a riskier bet. So she came right out and shouted.

“People of the Nation, do you like what your government is up to?”

The speech she gave was a masterstroke. Surely by luck, she had hit upon the fact that the people of this area never like what their government is up to and like nothing more than to complain about it. As a crowd began to gather near her soapbox, the woman with scraggly white hair seemed like a larger and larger figure, an artist then a hero then a myth. People began to nod, perhaps even to think, as she spoke of protests and demonstrations.

But when she asked who among them would stand with her, the answer was silence.

Until I called out from deep within the crowd. Then my voice was compounded by others, and others again. Promises spilled out from the crowd, a thousand little promises to sign onto the cause, and the promises’ white, twisting forms filled the sky. The many voices flowed together into a chant, and a march, and that march carried the protesters off toward city hall, until the policemen arrived and started killing people with clubs.

Vader, in the crowd’s center and not particularly tall, didn’t at first see the blood splashes. She heard only grunts, and the chant faltering, and the march collapsing, and saw the promises in the air rush forward to futilely protect their makers, and then the fast-panicking crowd carried her over the bodies lying on the ground. Vader bent and shielded Hugo from the increasingly violent jostling all around her, and at the same time her gorge rose and threatened to hack up an empty stomach. Hard thwacks tunneled into her eardrums from all around and she knew it had gone wrong. There was screaming, now. The screams made her panic blindly and Vader squeezed between skin, fur, and feathers as hard as she could with the toddler in her arms, fighting for the privilege of open air away from the bad sounds. She reached it, and ran full tilt down the cobbled street. Others had split off as well and she followed the terrified stragglers left and then right toward the sliding-closed city gates and she slid through the small remaining gap as tight breaths scratched her throat. Still they ran, into the nearby forest, until they could hear the city’s screams no more.

 

Vader Eloha stole a toddler and caused a death. Actually, a lot of deaths.

Not bad for one day…

But Vader Eloha is not so hopeful now. She is frightened. And there is a toddler in her arms; what is she to tell the toddler?

Three people escaped the city in addition to Vader Eloha and Hugo. Dedan, a tall man in a jacket with a huge smile. Japhet, an avian man with a long neck and great wings. And Enoch, a wide man who can stretch himself bigger and smaller.

Dedan and Enoch ran for the exit because they had no one.

Japhet had a brother.

He looked at Vader as he said that he had a brother, who was now dead. A puzzle piece quietly dropped out of Vader’s great heart, where she would never be able to find it.

“Who the hell are you,” asked Enoch, “and why the hell have you stolen the God Baby?”

Vader asked what’s the god baby.

“Oh,” said Hugo. “Well…” Everyone looked at him. “I make things.”

“He’s a mutant freak who magically makes things,” said Japhet, “and every normal person has heard a thousand stories about him while growing up, and the Nation has been trying to harness his power somehow, in fact their best Boxer has been on childcare duty because of that, and - you waltzed in there and took him?”

“I make things using broken promises,” Hugo added.

“Okay,” said Vader. “Okay, well - the first thing you should all know is… I have no memories at all.”

Japhet stared for a moment, then abruptly left the conversation by flapping up into the canopy.

“I really have no idea what I’m doing,” said Vader. “Or what I’ve done.” She started to cry. “I’m so sorry.”

Enoch had nothing more to say to her. He went to stand somewhere else. Dedan, by rights, should have felt the same. And yet he felt himself putting a hand on her shoulder. He said the best thing he could, which was, “your heart was in the right place.”

That was the domain of both Dedan and Vader. The heart.

Enoch’s was the brain. Therefore he came back a while later with a plan.

He said, “I think we should still try and stop the Nation.”

Japhet would have said “Are you crazy??” except that he was still absent, so Vader exploded for him.

“Are you _crazy!?”_

(Hugo pushed to be let down. He was uncomfortable with yelling.)

“We’re outcasts now, with nothing else to do,” said Enoch, who had until recently been a golem craftsman. “And more importantly, we have the God Baby. God Baby, do you think you can help us out?”

“Umm?” said Hugo. Vader had put him down, standing in his footie pajamas on the leafy underbrush.

“Sweetie, we want to help a lot of people. Can you help us with your powers?” asked Vader.

“So we’re asking a baby to destroy a whole army?” asked Dedan.

“Or relocate the victims,” mused Enoch.

 

They set off the next day, after learning the basics of camping through trial and error. Japhet went with them. He had come back with a haunted look, and spoke little.

“Right about now,” Enoch ventured after a long stretch of silence, “they are burying the bodies in the city. They are performing the rites.”

“Perhaps they will forget one,” said Japhet viciously. “Then a vengeful specter will destroy the Nation for us.”

 _Indeed,_ thought Vader. _If they make a mistake with the rites, your brother may yet have his revenge._ But she knew how unlikely it was. Any sane person was extremely careful with burials. All weapons were blunt, from the policemen’s clubs to the Boxers’ gloves, to prevent any laceration of the body from which a specter might escape. The proper ritual was always observed, no matter how lowly the departed soul. _The hatred born of death is neither rich nor poor, man nor woman, land nor sky,_ as they say.

...She had no idea how she knew any of that.

The country they traveled was flat and largely forested, with occasional farms to the South. As they got farther from the Nation’s capital, the group began to request hospitality and sleep in barns and sometimes get free breakfast in the morning (Hugo particularly enjoyed the bacon and sausages). Once, they stayed with a woman who was living alone. Hugo rudely asked about the promise that floated behind a chair in the dining room. It was shaped like a spiral with a slash through. The woman said it was the promise from her wife to return from the war.

“A little something to remember her by, and also to protect myself when she’s gone.” The woman laughed, but gave a warning look to Dedan, whose teeth could be disconcerting to people who didn’t know him.

Later on the road, Vader mentioned that she couldn’t remember ever having a promise made to her, though she somehow knew what they were.

“Well then, allow me,” said Enoch. “I promise to encourage your intelligence and to check your stupidity, as long as our paths are united.”

The promise bloomed in the air and hovered by Vader’s side. It was like a musical note.

Vader blushed. “That’s really nice.”

“It’s just the thing my family says,” said Enoch. “It’s just normal.”

 

The companions got their first glimpse of the Nation’s army far sooner than expected. It began with the sound of marching in the distance. Japhet then swooped down from the sky to report a square formation of vat soldiers, soon to cross their path.

Dedan wondered if they should avoid them.

“For what purpose?” said Japhet. “We are simply a group of travelers with no suspicious attributes. Trying to avoid soldiers - now that would be a suspicious attribute.”

Vader didn’t know about vat soldiers. The others had to explain.

“You know how the industrial revolution made everything mass-producible?” said Enoch.

“No?”

“Big metal factories, belching smoke,” Japhet added. “Everything plastic.”

“I feel like I’ve seen pictures,” Vader said slowly. Hugo wandered over, looking interested.

“Basically, they produce the ideal soldier, lots of times. A full army of killing machines.”

Vader covered Hugo’s ears, looking up reproachfully.

It was dark by the time they crossed the army’s path in the field. When she got a good look at them, Vader almost said, _this is the perfect killing machine?_

They were all identical. And they looked perfectly weak. Four limbs, 2x5 fingers… totally ordinary. Not even solidly build. They blinked big black eyes timidly.

“They look nervous even just marching,”  Vader murmured.

“I think they just need a home,” said Hugo.

Before they could find an excuse not to, the party was invited to camp with the army for the night, and play some card games or whatever. Whatever the soldiers’ apparent neuroses, they did turn out to be well-regimented and set up the campsite with efficiency. Vader (holding Hugo) and Dedan found themselves sitting around a campfire with their sworn enemies, and it was hard not to think of them as just… people. Well, weirdly identical people, anyway. One of the supersoldiers told a specter story about a boy who was murdered imperfectly, and gained the abilities of a specter while keeping his human intelligence.

Japhet had fluttered off into the trees, and Enoch was who-knew-where. At one point Vader thought to find him. On the way, she happened to pick up a book that had been left on one of the soldiers’ tent tarps. It was called _Zacharie vs The Forces of Evil._ She could not remember ever reading a book. Forgetting her friend for the moment, Vader found a rock to sit on near a kerosene lamp and began to read.

The great hero Zacharie is confronting the sinister Toad King, whose face is so ugly he hides it behind a mask! Zacharie advances through the throne room, boxing gloves ready, the unworthy king’s taunts ringing hollow in his ears. Then Zacharie’s mighty wings unfurl from behind his back, and the king knows true fear…!

 

_Meanwhile…_

_Enoch emerged from the other side of camp, carrying a filled backpack on his large back. Dedan, grinning, hailed him from beside the campfire, where the vat soldiers had all left for bed, leaving only a smattering of burnt marshmallows on sticks._

_Enoch took a seat beside his companion. He had a serious, abstracted expression. Dedan supposed that smart guys were obligated to look like that from time to time. Still…_

_“Something on your mind?” Dedan asked._

_“I hope you realize,” said Enoch, “that we haven’t truly decided yet how we’re going to do this momentous thing.”_

_Dedan noticed he spoke nonspecifically. Good idea - there might be soldiers still around._

_“True,” said Dedan. “I didn’t consider it my role to figure that out, but perhaps I should attempt to. Do you have any ideas?”_

_“Not exactly,” said Enoch. “I don’t know what our small friend can do exactly, but I do know it’s limited by his fuel source. Broken promises.”_

_“That’s so morbid.” What can a toddler know of broken promises? thought Dedan._

_“Yes, it is.” Enoch sighed. He watched the smoke of the dead campfire rise. Then he said, “you know, my friend, I’m glad to have you along.”_

_Dedan was touched. “And I you.”_

_“In fact,” said Enoch, “I promise to guard your health and safety as long as our paths are united. And that’s_ not _just something my family says to everyone.”_

_“I… I promise the same, Enoch.”_

_And with the two white mirror-image loops hanging above them, the cold night somehow seemed warmer._

 

Vader Eloha’s eyes flicked open. Daylight was breaching her tent. _Zacharie vs The Forces of Evil_ lay closed beside her. She had read the whole thing and then collapsed to sleep. She had dreamed about Zacharie and his wings. There was a fluttering in her heart she could not remember ever feeling.

Near the end of the night Japhet had grudgingly taken responsibility for Hugo, and had apparently left him in Vader’s tent while she slept. He was there curled up in his red pajamas. Vader picked herself up, not unlike that very first night, then picked him up and ventured outside. Only one of the soldiers was up, poking the ashes of the fire with a stick. He turned to look as she emerged - and then he stared.

At Hugo.

 _Oh,_ thought Vader, too slowly. _It was dark last night - and I remember, we were counting on that… Hugo’s red outfit wasn’t so bright, and his face wasn’t so distinct, so they didn’t know he was -_

“G-G-G-GodBaby,” stammered the vat soldier, apparently terrified.

“Um,” said Vader, “...No?”

“YOU’RE the criminal from central!” The soldier was now shaking violently. Vader was unnerved. “You’re - you’re - AAAAAAH!” And he screamed, getting higher and higher in pitch like a kettle before his head -

His head _exploded._

And out burst a pillar of smoke, high into the sky. Vader was frozen in horror, and Hugo shrieked in her arms.

The soldier shuddered once more and his body transformed - his fingers sharpened into talons as his hands grew huge and black, and he lunged forward, grasping at the woman and child.

She thought: _Oh. The perfect killing machine._

She thought: _Sharp claws. So it doesn’t even care about making specters._

She scrambled back instinctively, she and Hugo screaming, and the promise from Enoch jetted down from where it had hovered in the sky to smack the soldier in the chest, knocking it back. Vader ran as fast as she could into the woods, and the smoking soldier-thing followed. Darting around trees was all that kept it at bay, as she quickly ran out her energy and drew gasping, then choking breaths. Vader stumbled, and smelled the smoke jet right behind her, as Hugo wailed and cried. Then something flashed down from above and slammed into the soldier - it was Japhet, and he was punching and pummeling the creature with his balled-up claws, hammering again and again until it fell to the forest floor, went still, and the smoke jet ceased.

Voices from the campsite. Other soldiers, woken, wondered about the screams.

“Th-th-thank you, Japhet,” said Vader, half-crying. “I promise I won’t make you fight for me again.” And a squiggly promise bloomed beside Japhet.

He took off flying without an answer. Vader ran after, away from the campsite, Hugo in tow, who was crying completely.

They got away.

 

They continued.

They had no idea what became of Dedan and Enoch. They could have bluffed their way out in one way or another. Or they could have become further victims of Vader Eloha’s mistakes.

 _I’m a hurricane,_ Vader whispered to herself one night. Japhet wasn’t listening. He kept to himself in the sky. They were traveling together, barely.

The destination had always been the border of the Nation - that ever-expanding border - where the armies and the Boxers marched and the innocent fled; where ‘purification’ happened. Specifically, a plantation town in the West.

At first Vader had nightmares about the smoking soldier, then about the march in the city, then about broken promises and specters. But one day the flutter of Japhet’s wings reminded her of someone…

What would Zacharie do?

Keep moving forward. Whatever the odds.

She started talking to Hugo about his powers. He wasn’t comfortable destroying an army. So she took the other tack - finding a new place for refugees to live.

It transpired that Hugo could create a whole world, with sufficient broken promises. And where would you find a lot of unfulfilled promises?

She hated to say it, but an abandoned town-turned-battlefield sounded about right. The terror, the pain, and _I’ll never let anything happen to you._ How many times had that phrase alone been said?

Said, and then cut off by grasping, blackened hands in a cloud of acrid smoke - burning, _burning -_ and Vader woke up sweating and gasping and guilty, oh so guilty, _who have I killed this time?_ Only it was nothing, nothing, only the specters of the past.

And she opened her tired eyes and faced the day, and a child who depended on her.

What Would Zacharie Do?

Finish the job. It doesn’t matter what it takes. Just save the day.

Somewhere along the way she had come to depend on that world in the book, where the day is always saved. _If only I can be like Zacharie…_

_Then everyone can have a happy ending._

 

Only a few days from the town, Japhet again spotted Nation forces on an intercept course - this time, only a lone man.

Needless to say they veered around him.

Then Japhet reported he was giving chase.

They ran. Vader hugging Hugo tight, cursing her unpracticed legs (come on, we’ve been hiking for how long now?), Japhet flapping his powerful wings. Vader’s promise to Japhet swept along behind them. Then, as Vader Eloha glanced back, she saw another pair of wings unfurl. Their lone pursuer had leapt high over the treetops and was silhouetted in the air, including a certain pair of huge, majestic appendages.

She mouthed his name involuntarily.

This was… impossible.

And then he slammed down to Earth. That ridiculously long jump had quartered the distance between then and now he ran the rest of it, inhumanly fast, and stopped in front of them. His face was long, his expression cocky, with two sets of eyes and messy black hair.

In Vader’s vision he seemed to sparkle.

What he said was: “Hey, gimme the kid.”

“Over my dead body,” said Japhet into Vader’s stunned silence.

“He’s my responsibility,” said Zacharie. “Come on. The boss will be all over me if I don’t get him back. Not that he ever does any good.”

And that got to her. Rang Vader’s bell. Because she didn’t know _how_ she knew anything, but she still _knew_ that you don’t ever tell a kid they never do any good.

“Excuse me?” said Vader Eloha to the amazing Zacharie. “Just what do you mean by that?”

“Well, they made me basically his dad.”

Hugo was glaring at the man vehemently. Vader’s voice almost broke as she spoke - somewhere inside she knew, there would be hell to pay because her world had just flipped over - but all she could think of right now was, “Sounds like you’re a real piece of shit dad, okay? This kid asked me to rescue him from you!”

Zacharie sighed, as if the argument wasn’t even worth his time. He raised his boxing gloves and stepped forward, deadly casual. “Gimme the kid or I’ll clock you.”

And Vader started to sweat. Clock you meant _clock_ you. You don’t cross a Boxer… _unless you want to go the way of the Toad King._

But Hugo looked ten times more scared. But that reminded her -

“Hugo. You’re the GodBaby. You can make something!”

“Make _what?”_ He whispered.

“I don’t know! Something like him, but better!”

“I need betrayal energy!”

She thought.

She got it.

Before she could think better of it -

“Japhet. Please, I need you to fight the Boxer for me.”

Japhet’s look of shock and anger was somehow off, somehow unsettling. But she was distracted from it an instant later, when the squiggly-line promise that floated nearby went bang, popped - and Hugo screwed up his face and a person - _bloomed_ and _unfolded_ out of the air, arms and legs stretching out, phasing into being to stand on the packed-dirt ground.

He looked exactly like Zacharie.

Except he was holding a bat.

“Who’s this imposter?” the new creature asked, looking down his nose at his double.

“Someone impure,” murmured Hugo.

And in a flash the Zacharies were locked in combat. Smack! Smack! Smack! A whirl of bat and gloves. Smack! Smack! Smack! Faster than the spectators could process. Smack! Smack! Smack! And then Zacharie unfurled his wings to take off, but the batter swung and CRUNCH - Zacharie screamed in pain as his smashed wing crumpled behind him, and he sank to his knees. The batter leveled his bat at Zacharie’s head, and the fight was over.

Zacharie was breathing hard. Slowly, he raised his hands in a pained sign of surrender.

“Leave this place, usurper,” said the batter.

Zacharie did.

 

They decided it was about time to make camp for the night. The batter camped with them.

And Vader, alone with her thoughts under the trees and stars…

...felt that she was falling into a deep, deep well.

_What were the chances?_

_Why did I have to actually meet my idol?_

And with sweet lies gone, what were you left with?

_The CRUNCH of a wingbone breaking under steel -_

That was supposed to be victory. But it was only… horrible.

_I broke my own hero’s wings._

_I killed that soldier by making him go up in smoke._

Talk about absurd things to blame yourself for. _But if I’d never existed, it wouldn’t have happened… Japhet wouldn’t be in this mess…_ I _wouldn’t be in this mess…_

Whoever brought me here, or put me here, or made me this way…

 _I can’t help but curse that person,_ thought Vader Eloha. It was a horrible, bitter thought. But it was a solid thought. And she desperately wanted something to hold onto.

In the morning the idea had baked in, like a bug under amber. Life was a sordid story. Vader couldn’t wait to get to the end of it. She and Hugo and Japhet set off for the Western plantation town, probably long since purified. Japhet said nothing to her. It took her embarrassingly long to remember her broken promise to him.

 _Well, if he couldn’t see why that was necessary…_ I mean, If Vader Eloha spent time feeling bad for every single person she hurt, she would be here all day.

They could see the town was dead from miles away. Almost every window was smashed and many houses were mangled and falling over. A single flag stood dead center with the mark of the Nation. Future development.

Worse, the place was crawling with specters. Gloomy white shapes darted back and forth on the roofs and through the air. Vader didn’t know what they looked like close up, and wasn’t sure she wanted to.

But as they entered the city proper, going carefully so as not to draw attention, they met with a nice surprise. Dedan stepped out of a doorway and waved.

Vader waved back, still careful not to make much noise. “You’re here!” she whispered. Dedan nodded.

“That’s good,” said Hugo. “Because I’m planning to make each of you Guardian of a Zone in the new world. You, Vader...”

“It’s like Enoch said - there really are lots of promises here!” said a grinning Dedan in hushed tones. “They’re mostly hiding deeper inside buildings, in dark corners. Or sinking into the ground. Because their objects and subjects are… gone.”

“...and you, Japhet...”

Vader looked around for Enoch, and saw him step out of another door in the same building. Something about his expression seemed wrong. She had an intuition, but she wasn’t quite sure what it meant.

“...and you, Enoch...”

“So,” said Japhet, “how exactly are we meant to catalyze all these promises to use them?”

“...and you, Dedan.”

A shadow suddenly loomed from behind Dedan. Vader nearly shouted to him, but her caution about the specters reasserted itself. A moment later, a bare, steel fist had smashed into Dedan’s head and laid him on the ground. Standing behind him was another Dedan, this one made of metal and looking furious.

The promise from Enoch to Dedan, that floating arc from the night at the campfire, exploded with a BANG into a million pieces. And then every other promise in the vicinity, hundreds, shattered or snapped or popped or cracked in a cacophony that filled the very air with a thick, powdery mist. Hugo concentrated, and then space was swirling around, spinning, spinning, and Vader was caught up in a massive whirlwind that enveloped creation. Her mind peeled apart from her body, the connection still there but thin, as she connected to a thousand other inputs. Enoch’s mind was there, a supernova of guilt, and the plan was laid bare -

_To trigger the domino effect - > an extreme betrayal was needed -> a betrayal as great as a murder -> of a truly trusted friend -> the needs of the many -> outweigh the few -> but Dedan had a role to play in the new world -> so Enoch, the golem craftsman, had to make a replacement ->_

_But how did you know after we separated that Hugo wanted Dedan as a Guardian??_

_Great minds think alike,_ was the rueful reply. _And I had planned most of it before._

It was that last which sent Vader into a topspin of rage. You had plans? You manipulated us? So I was a puppet throughout an actual _majority_ of my sad, sordid life -

My life.

My whole life, which started a few weeks ago, soaking wet in a room like a baby’s jail cell.

My life, which started because Hugo wished it.

And Hugo wished it because he wanted to leave.

And he wanted to leave because he was mad at Zacharie.

And he was mad at Zacharie because Zacharie broke his teddy bear.

And Zacharie had promised not to hurt Hugo’s toys.

And with the betrayal of that promise, Hugo made a _tool_ -

I AM THE PRODUCT OF A RIPPED TEDDY BEAR AND A SPOILED CHILD’S WHIM!

Unthinkingly, Vader pulled herself _away_ from the toddler as hard as she could, stretching the bonds that connected each of them in this space, trying to snap it, to be alone, to forget what she meant and what she was and what she’d done, and Hugo pulled back, like she was stuck on his knitting needles, and that made her furiouser and furiouser and she tugged harder, trying to rip and tear, and harder, and harder, and felt the strain in her own mind but she didn’t care, no she didn’t care, nothing could be worse, nothing could really happen, she had to get AWAY!

And she snapped.

 

And the winds subsided… and a monochrome world asserted itself.

A thing that called itself Vader Eloha picked itself up off the ground.

It… She... stared dispassionately at her surroundings. They looked as grey as she felt. There was nothing more to interest her here. But had the main purpose been fulfilled?

Another thing, which didn’t call itself anything in particular, also got up, with far more grace and energy. She looked around with interest, emotions bouncing around unconnected in an empty head.

Hugo stared in horror. “I was making you a Zone Guardian,” he said. “But you pulled away. I’m sorry, I… I…”

Vader Eloha looked out at the world, and realized something was amiss. Instead of empty, waiting buildings and cities, the Zones were filled with people. Weirdly identical people...

“Soldiers. You filled the world with those stupid vat soldiers. That defeats the entire purpose. Where are the refugees to go?”

“Oh, _god,_ ” said Enoch. “This was all for nothing?”

“They disgust me,” said the replacement Dedan, to no one in particular.

“Stupid boy. You are a sick monster,” spat Vader Eloha.

“Hey - !” Enoch started, but Vader Eloha shut him up with a slow, scalding glare that asked who exactly _he_ was to go and preach being nice to people.

“What, ah…” said the nameless woman, with vague, fumbling enunciation. “What’s going on…?” She giggled.

“I didn’t get what you wanted…” said Hugo, trying not to cry. “I just got confused… they needed a home!”

Japhet looked at the Vader-halves without sympathy. “You brought this on yourself, sugar.”

The nameless woman tilted her head, curious. “Sugar…?”

Vader Eloha considered the new problem, and realized she didn’t really care in the slightest, if the refugees got saved, or whatever. She didn’t suppose she really cared about anything. Still, she had some instincts to work from.

“You three,” she said. “You’re the main Guardians of the Zones. I’m going to be the Queen, so I want you all to swear fealty to me.”

It was true. She was going to be the Queen. Respectively with dazed horror, eager respect, and apathy, her three companions sent their promises to float beside her. Shapes in the air, like three musical notes.

 


End file.
